About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

16 November 2016

'The Front Page'

What could possibly live up to the descriptors “one of the
lustiest productions of the Broadway market” and “one of the most madcap farces
of the period”? That was John Gassner
(1903-1967), drama critic, theater historian, and professor of criticism and
dramaturgy. How about “an evening with
loud, rapid, coarse and unfailing entertainment” and “a steaming broth of
excitement and comedy”? That was Brooks
Atkinson (1894-1984), venerable theater reviewer for the New York Times and the dean of the New York theater press
corps. They were both effusing over the
original production of what Peter Marks of the Washington Post just called “the best play about newspapering ever
written”: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 perennial audience-pleaser, The Front Page—or, as Ben Brantley
characterized it in his New York Times
review, “just about everybody’s favorite play about journalism.”

I’d never actually seen The
Front Page on stage until this month—though, of course, I’ve seen all of
the films based on it many times. So
when I saw the announcement that a new revival of the classic comedy was going
to play Broadway once again (the last time was 1986 when it received two Tony
nominations), I gladly signed up. The
list of cast members clinched the deal for me.
Diana, my regular theater companion, and I got mezzanine seats for the
evening performance Friday, 4 November, at the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th
Street, where the revival began previews on 20 September and opened on 20
October. The limited-run production will
close on 29 January 2017.

The Front Page has
been presented in rep companies all around the country as well as in colleges
and community theaters and it’s been presented four times on the Great White
Way. The début was on 14 August 1928 at
the Times Square Theatre where it ran for 276 performances under the direction
of playwright George S. Kaufman. The
show was produced by the great Jed Harris with Osgood Perkins as Walter Burns
and Lee Tracy as Hildy Johnson; featured were Frances Fuller as Peggy Grant,
Hildy’s fiancée, and Dorothy Stickney as Molly Malone, the proverbial hooker
with a heart of gold. (It wasn’t a
cliché yet.) Revivals came in 1946,
directed by playwright MacArthur with Arnold Moss as Burns and Lew Parker as
Hildy; 1969, directed by Harold J. Kennedy (who also played Bensinger of the Tribune) with Robert Ryan as Burns and
Bert Convy as Hildy and featuring Helen Hayes—Mrs. Charles MacArthur—as Mrs.
Grant, Hildy’s prospective mother-in-law; and 1986, directed by Jerry Zaks and
starring John Lithgow as Burns and Richard Thomas as Hildy.

The film adaptations of Front
Page began with the 1931 straight adaptation helmed by Lewis Milestone with
Adolphe Menjou as Burns and Pat O'Brien as Hildy. In 1940, Columbia Pictures and filmmaker
Howard Hawks (with Hecht’s complicity) made Hildy a female reporter played, by Rosalind
Russell, working for shifty editor Burns, played by Cary Grant, turning the
knock-about farce into a successful and popular romantic comedy. In 1974; Universal Pictures and director
Billy Wilder returned to the original gender line-up, but in color this time,
and cast Walter Matthau as Burns and Jack Lemmon as Hildy, a paring that became
irresistible after the success of the 1968 movie version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. (In addition to The Front Page, Matthau and Lemmon acted together in six film
comedies plus JFK and The Grass Harp.)

There were also three television versions of Front Page, one in 1945 on WNBT (now
WNBC) in New York City, directed by Ed Sobol with Matt Crowley as Burns and Vinton
Hayworth as Hildy; given the date of this production, I’m guessing it was a
live broadcast of the play from which a kinescope was made. In 1970, the Hughes TV Network (that would be
Howard Hughes), a short-lived network, aired a TV movie directed by Alan Handley with Robert Ryan as Burns
and George Grizzard as Hildy. There was
also an early television series that ran on CBS from 1949 to 1950; the series
was directed by Franklin Heller with John
Daly as Burns and Mark Roberts as Hildy.

New York City-born Ben Hecht (1894-1964) began reporting for
the ChicagoDaily News (represented in Front
Page by Schwartz) in 1912 and then wrote for the Daily Journal (Murphy); in 1923, he started his own paper, the ChicagoLiterary Times. He soon started
writing short plays and even contributed a piece to the art-loving Washington
Square Players (see “The Washington Square Players: Art for Art’s Sake” on ROT, 21 and 24 June 2012), The Hero of Santa Maria (1917). In 1922 he had a full-length play, The Egotist, on stage in New York. Hecht also collaborated with another former newspaperman,
Gene Fowler (1890-1960), on The Great
Magoo (1932). Hecht was also a
short-story writer and novelist who wrote, among other prose works, Erik Dorn (1921), A Jew in Love (1930), and A
Guide to the Bedevilled (1944). He
also wrote a serious drama, To Quito and
Back (1937), and was a prolific and well-regarded Hollywood screenwriter,
perhaps best known for the motion pictures Twentieth
Century (1934), The Scoundrel
(1935; Academy Award for screenwriting, shared with MacArthur), Wuthering Heights (1939; Academy Award
nomination for writing, with MacArthur), Gunga
Din (1939), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946). Hecht’s autobiography, A Child of the Century, was published in 1954.

Charles MacArthur (1895-1956), born in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
was the nephew of playwright Edward Sheldon (1886-1946), the son of a stern
evangelical clergyman, and the brother of John D. MacArthur (1897-1978),
benefactor of the MacArthur Fellowships (the “genius grants”). He’d been a student at a theological seminary
for two years before leaving home to join William Randolph Hearst’s publishing
empire to write for the ChicagoTribune (Bensinger) and the Herald-Examiner
(Hildy). Taking to journalism with exceptional verve,
he became a successful feature writer, and he resumed his newspaper career
after returning from service in the World War I. His début in the theater was a collaboration
with Edward Sheldon on Lulu Belle (1926). Next he collaborated with Sidney Howard
(1891-1939) on Salvation (1928). MacArthur, who in 1928 married “the first
lady of the American stage,” Helen Hayes (1900-1993), was also the adoptive
father of actor James MacArthur (1937-2010), “Danno” on the original version of
the TV series Hawaii Five-O (1968-80). Like his frequent collaborator, MacArthur was
also a screenwriter, penning scripts for The
Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), Rasputin
and the Empress (1932; Academy Award nomination for writing), and (with
Hecht) Wuthering Heights. MacArthur assumed the editorship of the
combined Theatre Arts and Stage magazines in 1948 and was inducted
posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1983.

The Hecht-MacArthur collaboration continued with Twentieth Century (1933)—which became the
John Barrymore movie and a Broadway musical, On the Twentieth Century—and the circus musical spectacular, Jumbo (1935). These were followed by Ladies and Gentleman (1939), and Swan Song (1946). The two
ex-newspapermen collaborated on screenplays for some of Hollywood’s most
popular films from 1933 until their deaths (and beyond, if you include later
adaptations and derivations such as Switching
Channels, a 1988 reimagining of The
Front Page for TV news.)

The Front Page is
a sort of exposé of the freewheeling world of popular journalism of the day,
which, of course, Hecht and MacArthur not only knew well from the inside but
had been past masters at practicing. Here’s
how the pair had Hildy Johnson describe the profession in the play:

Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines! like a lot of
coach dogs! Waking people up in the
middle of the night to ask them what they think of Mussolini. Stealing pictures off old ladies of their
daughters that get raped in Oak Park. A
lot of lousy, daffy buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants,
borrowing nickels from office boys!

The soon-to-be-former reporter characterizes newsmen as a “cross
between a bootlegger and a whore,” and we eavesdrop as the members of the
fourth estate would rather invent a news story than report one. Audiences
in 1928 would immediately have recognized the characters in the play—in fact,
Chicagoans would have realized exactly at whom the authors were pointing their
fingers as they were all but naming names.
Hecht and MacArthur “had axes to grind,” said director Jack O’Brien. The director of the current revival continued
that the former ink-stained wretches knew exactly whom their characters
represented: “They are based on real characters from Chicago.” According to Gassner, however, the play “was
actually too carefree to provide any pertinent analysis or to make any show of
indignation” regarding the journalistic practices then in common use.

The play’s first act establishes the characters like the
pilot of a sit-com. (Of the journalists, only Walter Burns, the
high-powered editor of the Herald-Examiner,
isn’t seen until Act Two. Most of the important characters are
introduced in Act One—including, in this revival, the catalytic figure of Earl
Williams, the escaped convict.) Director
O’Brien has rejiggered the script some (Jesse Green in New York magazine reported that the production script was “cobbled
together from several versions”) so that, for one thing, the first act ends
with the surprise appearance of escaped convict Williams, something that
happens in the middle of Act Two in the published version. (Some explosive language used plentifully in
the 1928 text has also been excised.)

All three acts of Front
Page are set in the well-used Press Room of the Criminal Courts Building in
Chicago, which looks down on the yard behind the Cook County Jail where a gallows
is being tested for the early morning hanging of Earl Williams, convicted of
shooting a black cop to death. It’s late
October 1928 and an election is looming for the Mayor of Chicago (Dann Florek)
and the Sheriff of Cook County (John Goodman).
Reporters from most of the city’s dailies are killing time playing poker,
cracking wise about the day’s events, and gossiping about the whereabouts and
prospective marriage of their colleague Hildy Johnson (John Slattery). Hildy, ace reporter for the Herald-Examiner and the gang’s
undisputed star, is late and the scuttlebutt is that he’s quitting the news
racket for marriage and a straight job.

The reporters are waiting to witness the execution of
Williams, a white man and supposed Communist revolutionary, and they’d just as
soon Sheriff Hartman would move the time a few hours earlier so they can make
the morning editions, but Hartman refuses to execute his prisoner before
sunrise—lest no voters see him do his duty.
Hildy blows into the press room only to say good-bye, confirming the
rumors of his marriage and departure.
(He’s going to New York to work in his fiancée’s uncle’s ad agency at
the munificent salary of $150 a week, just over $2,000 today. Reporters were paid half that.) All of a sudden, the reporters hear a hubbub
from the jail—Williams has escaped. All the
newsmen rush out for more information, but Hildy pauses to decide what to do,
torn between his decision to leave this world for good and his instincts as a
reporter. As Hildy stands alone in the
press room, Williams (John Magaro) crashes through the window. He tells Hildy he’s not a Red—just an
anarchist, and that he shot the policeman by accident. The reporter realizes that Williams has been railroaded
just to help the mayor and the sheriff win enough “colored” votes (Hecht and
MacArthur used the ‘n’-word casually throughout the play, but O’Brien switched
it out) to be re-elected. With the
hottest scoop of his life in his grasp—never mind his waiting fiancée and the
New York Central to the Big Apple—Hildy hides Williams inside a roll-top desk
that belongs to Bensinger (Jefferson Mays), the fussy reporter for the Tribune.
Now what Hildy has to do is get Williams out of the court building
before rival papers or trigger-happy cops find him. Out of options, Hildy calls Walter Burns
(Nathan Lane), his editor at the Examiner,
for help.

Burns, a devious and single-minded man who’ll do anything to
prevent Hildy from leaving the paper, arrives on the scene and puts into action
plans to get the whole desk out of the building. Before he can accomplish that, however, everyone
returns to the press room at once, putting the kibosh on Burns’s scheme and
putting Williams, still hiding in the desk, in danger of being discovered. Indeed, he is found out as guns are drawn and
accusations echo through the room. Just
as Williams is about to be led off to face his execution, Irving Pincus (Robert
Morse), a messenger from the governor, arrives from Springfield with a reprieve
for the condemned man—which the mayor and the sheriff had earlier tried to
suppress. So Hildy smoothes over the
ruffled feelings of his fiancée, Peggy Grant (Halley Feiffer), and her mother
(Holland Taylor) and rushes to catch his train to New York. As soon as the wedding party leaves, though,
Burns is on the phone to his lackey at the Examiner
ordering him to wire the police chief at the first stop eastward on the New
York Central line to arrest Hildy—for the theft of the engraved watch Burns had
just given the reporter as a going-away gift!

The Front Page is long—two hours and 40 minutes with
two intermissions (and that’s with cuts in the text); the final curtain came
down just before 11 p.m. Brantley’s
review was right on in one respect at least: the play doesn’t take off until
Nathan Lane’s Walter Burns makes his entrance in Act Two. In fact, the
plot doesn’t even get started until the last moment of Act One when Earl
Williams makes his entrance into the court house press room through the window.
The whole first act is set-up—not even exposition (though there is some
of that), but really character establishment. As I noted, The Front
Page works like a sit-com, with stock characters with clear
traits that don’t develop or change interacting with one another and the situation
in ways dictated by the character traits. The plot is driven by the central,
unexpected situation surprise—in Front Page, it’s the escape of
Williams and then to up the ante, his appearance in the press room when only
Hildy is there. The humor derives from the way the established characters
respond to the situation. So the whole first act sets up the personalities
and their interrelationships, and then the situation gets knotty. The
resolution is essentially an honest-to-God deus ex machina introduced
as a way to end the plot because the organic ending, namely the execution of
Williams, wouldn’t be comic.

If it weren’t for the witty and literate writing
of Hecht and MacArthur, and a dollop of authenticity because they were
both actual Chi-town newspapermen, Front Page wouldn’t be
worth reviving. This production enhances that by casting all
the main roles with stage stars (Lane, Morse, Mays, Goodman) or top-flight
stage pros (Slattery, Taylor, Florek, David Pittu). In a way, this is the
stage equivalent of one of those old Hollywood flicks with a cast of collected
stars and well-known personalities (It’s
aMad Mad Mad Mad World, for example, or What’s New Pussycat?). When the mix works, it’s glorious;
when it doesn’t, it’s chaos. Front Page isn’t quite glorious,
but it’s far from a mess—once the match is struck. (Lane is inspired,
however! Everyone else steps up his or her game when he shows.)

The single set which confines the play is slightly tilted,
as if designer Douglas W. Schmidt were hinting at Expressionism—suggesting that
Chicago journalism is an off-kilter world.
The large center of the room, with the big table that serves as the desk
for most of the press corps (except Bensinger, who has that roll-top), is quite
straight—if shabby and grimy. (Jennie,
the requisite Irish charwoman played by Patricia Conolly, comes in daily to run
a mop around the floor, but I got the distinct impression that the water in her
bucket is none too clean to start with.) Strewn with papers, pencils, notebooks,
playing cards, poker chips, coffee cups, remains of carry-out meals—and the
all-important seven 1920’s candlestick telephones, one for each paper—the table,
a few chairs, and Bensinger’s prized desk—formerly the property of Mayor Fred
A. Busse, 1886-1914, according to the script’s set description, whose 1907-11
administration was known for widespread corruption and the presence of
organized crime in the city—are all that the room contains for amenities. There’s a bathroom up left and across the
stage right wall is a row of tall windows that look down onto the jail yard
where Earl Williams’s gallows stands.
But above the back wall, beyond which is the building’s corridor and at
the stage right end of which is the room’s entrance, the transom windows slope
downward the the left, skewing the set’s perspective unnaturally. The pictorial detail, however, is all
early-20th-century Naturalism. The room
where the play’s ink-stained wretches live—they go home only rarely when
there’s a story breaking—and work could serve as a metaphor for their
profession: grubby and slightly bent.

Brian MacDevitt’s lighting gives a semblance of film noir to the production, never
getting much brighter than twilight (or, perhaps, dawn), and Ann Roth’s
costumes capture the slovenly, down-at-heels garb of the newshounds, the
dressier look of the pols, and the ’20s spiff of the upper-crust Grant ladies—often
with a delightful little character fillip included (Mrs. Grant’s velvet
admiral’s bicorne, for example). (When
Holland Taylor is carried out of the press room by two goons, stiff as a
corpse, her patrician coif and traveling duds make an irresistible image of
absurdity.) Scott Lehrer’s soundscape provides the (constantly) ringing
phones, police alarms, sirens, gunshots, along with snippets of period songs to
set the atmosphere and milieu of the play.

Director Jack O’Brien (who also staged last year’s Broadway
mounting of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only A Play with Lane and another all-star cast)
makes effective, naturalistic stage pictures with the large cast (26 members),
but is less successful with the depiction of the individual characters,
especially the scrum of reporters. Camera
flashes separate each act with freezes in a way that recalls TV’s NCIS, but still works nicely here. (It’s also reminiscent of the current
Internet craze, the Mannequin Challenge, that started in October.) O’Brien, whose had lots of experience with
large-cast shows and musicals (The Coast
of Utopia, Henry IV – both
Tony-winners), doesn’t manage so well, either, with developing the nuances in
the key characters like Hildy and Peggy, who remain kind of bland and pale, and
without this the play has a hole in the middle.

Nonetheless, the director keeps the play moving at an
increasing pace, like a New York Central locomotive accelerating on its way
from the Windy City to Gotham. That
first act is slow-moving—some of the deletions, though for efficiency’s as well
as political correctness’s sake, may have simultaneously diluted the levity—and
seemed nearly interminable (though it was really only about 45 or 50
minutes. (The lack of definition among
the reporters doesn’t help this problem.)
But once the plot is ignited with the escape of Earl Williams, the
proceedings start to pick up speed and energy, and O’Brien adds coal to the
engine with each plot twist—Williams’s coming through the press room window,
Walter Burns’s arrival on the scene, the discovery of Williams’s in the desk,
Pincus’s showing up suddenly—until the moment of Hildy and the Grants’ happy
departure is almost an explosion. Then,
in a brief post-climax that drops the energy down to almost calm, Burns makes
that underhanded phone call.

The cast of The Front
Page is odd in one significant sense: it’s an ensemble for the most
part—yes, Burns is a star part and Hildy should be, too, but overall, this play
works as a group effort—but O’Brien’s ensemble is made up of stars and
near-stars. Generally, it works fine,
with a few exceptions (which don’t scuttle the whole effort, fortunately). As I observed, the gang of scribblers needs
to have been differentiated more—all those terrific character actors never
really get a chance to shine as actors or as comments on the journalism
profession the way I think Hecht and MacArthur wanted them to. They’re just sort of general hubbub; Jennie,
the cleaning lady, and Woodenshoes (Micah Stock), the amateur psychology-wonk
German cop, make more of an impression than the reporters do, and they’re
little more than window-dressing. I put
the onus for this on O’Brien, but the result is that what ought to have been a
mosaic of different personalities all clamoring for focus never really
gelled.—and all those performers who usually have no trouble standing out—Mays,
Pittu (Schwartz of the Daily News),
Lewis J. Stadlen (Endicott of the Post),
Christopher McDonald (Murphy of the Journal),
Joey Slotnick (Wilson of the American),
Dylan Baker (McCue of the City News Bureau), and Clarke Thorell (Kruger of the Journal of Commerce)—all get lost.

Dann Florek as the corrupt Mayor; Sherie Rene Scott as
Mollie Malloy, the hooker with a thing for Earl Williams; John Magaro’s
Williams; Conolly’s Jennie; and Stock’s Woodenshoes Eichhorn all fare better,
given a moment or two to strut (although Stock has the strangest German accent
I ever heard—Kate Wilson was the dialect coach), and Mays’s fussbudget Bensinger
manage to take the stage once or twice.
The featured cast does best of all, not surprisingly, by virtue of the
script. Goodman’s Sheriff Hartman, not
just dishonest but incompetent (Williams escapes using a gun Hartman gave him
voluntarily!), plays the role as a kind if Southern dimwit (yeah, I dunno,
either), but he’s pretty low-energy (if you’ll pardon the Trumpism). I understand the actor has lost considerable
weight recently; maybe his girth is like Samson’s hair—it gives him his
strength. Robert Morse (whom I saw back
in about 1961 as J. Pierrepont Finch in How
to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the role that made him a
star) is almost indemnified from being ill-used because of his positioning—he
has two self-contained scenes where he gets to play the befuddled but
incorruptible government functionary right at the center of the action—and he
handles it with wit and style and conviction.
It’s a set piece and Morse, just as I’d have expected, knocks it out of
the park.

The women characters, though treated shabbily by Hecht and
MacArthur—they present us with a washerwoman, a whore, a shrew, and a
battleaxe, pretty much running the gamut of female stereotypes—get by as
performances at the same level as the men.
Of the Grant women, Holland Taylor’s Mrs. Grant comes of best, though
there’s a hitch in the character choice.
Taylor is among the strongest figures on the Front Page stage, with the most considered and complete
character. The actor pursues a strong
action, unwaveringly and with conviction, even when it gets her into
difficulties. The problem is that
instead of a ball-buster, which is closer to how she’s written, Taylor and
O’Brien have turned Grant mère into a reasonable-but-confused matron. The
Front Page is a play of extremes, even stereotypical extremes, and two
reasonable woman wheedling Hildy doesn’t make the mechanism go ‘round. If Peggy’s an ingratiating inveigler, then
the play gets more laughs if mama’s a bear.
It would also work better if Peggy is a sterner presence than Halley
Feiffer is here. What she’s doing is
fine; but she needs to ratchet up the stakes: she’s after a man who’s addicted
to newspapering—he mainlines printer’s ink.
It isn’t a vacation to Maui she’s taking Hildy away on, it’s a cold-turkey
detox into a whole new life. She’s got
to fight, or Burns, the dope peddler, wins.

That brings me to John Slattery as the news junkie
himself. The Front Page is essentially a battle of wills between Walter
Burns and Hildy Johnson. Hildy wants to
get out of the news racket, get married, and lead something of a normal
life. (Let’s not get into whether the really
wants to or not. Oh, and by the way:
there’s a serendipitous jokelet at which some on the audience chuckled because
Hildy’s going into advertising—and Slattery’s best known for starring in the
AMC show Mad Men, a series about the
ad biz. Front Page costar Morse was also featured on that show.) Burns doesn’t want to let his star reporter
go and he’ll use any means to get what he wants. Everyone else in the play is just an
impediment to the two Examiner men’s
goals, monkey wrenches for the works. Hildy
and Burns have to be equally matched, or the tug-o’-war doesn’t work right, and
Slattery isn’t pulling his end of the rope hard enough. Lane’s Walter Burns wipes up the floor with
him. It’s as if Slattery’s Hildy knows
going in he doesn’t want to leave, so he just goes through the paces of pulling
back against Burns. It’s a half-hearted
attempt, making this Front Page a
one-sided fight.

If it weren’t for Nathan Lane, there’d be no contest at
all. Dramatically (and comedically)
speaking, Lane is pulling his weight and Slattery’s. So the play doesn’t get started until the plot
gets underway with Williams’s escape, but the production doesn’t take off until
Walter Burns gets on stage. Lane doesn’t
just light a spark, he ignites a firestorm.
He bounces around the set, he shouts, he cracks wise, he bullies, he
barks orders, he bribes, he wheedles, he dissembles. Theatrically, he’s a one-man band crossed
with the Energizer bunny. As far as I’m
concerned, his performance is worth the price of admission all by itself.

The press coverage of The
Front Page was extensive. Show-Score
surveyed 47 reviews (as of 15 November) for an average rating of 70. 55% of the reviews were positive, 17% were
negative, and 28% were mixed. The
highest score in the sampling was a single 100 (Time Out New York) and there were two 95’s (Variety, Huffington Post);
the lowest score was a 25 (BroadwaySelect),
the lowest I’ve ever seen on the site, and there was also one 30 (WNYC). (“First-nighters” were required to see the
show on opening night in an apparent homage to traditional old-time theater journalism;
reviewers from weeklies and others with later deadlines came to subsequent
performances. Some review-writers
suspected director O’Brien and lead producer Scott Rudin might have had an ulterior
motive for the move.)

In the Wall Street
Journal, Terry Teachout described The
Front Page as “a comic masterpiece in its own unromantic, hard-charging
right,” having compared it in passing with His
Girl Friday, but reported that “it’s a grievous disappointment to report
that this much-anticipated revival is slack and lackluster, a case study in how
to get a good play wrong.” Despite “high
quality” actors, this Front Page is
“ineffective,” and Teachout blames director O’Brien. “The pacing is on the slow side and some of
the performances are surfacey and under-vitalized,” he wrote, and though
certain actors—the Journal reviewer
named Mays, Morse, and Stadlen—“blast the bull’s-eye right out of the
target, the cast as a whole feels like a random collection of talented
performers, not a true ensemble,” he criticized Goodman, “who . . . barely
comes across at all,” and Slattery, whose “Hildy is a disaster, blandly likable
but devoid of charisma.” Slattery’s failure
“to make much of an impression . . . necessarily puts a gaping hole in the
center of the show.” Teachout declared,
“The biggest problem of all is that Mr. O’Brien has softened the tungsten-hard
tone of” the play, which “is played for laughs, not truth, and that’s why it
falls so flat.” The Journalist complained of O’Brien’s sanitizing of the script, “regrettably
exemplary of his toothless approach” and “an all-too-clear indication of his
squirming discomfort with the thousand-proof ferocity of Hecht and MacArthur.” Teachout ended by stating that Lane’s
performance is “great.” “Too great,
really: No sooner does he make his first entrance midway through the second act
than the energy level of the production skyrockets. Suddenly you see what was
missing up to that point, and realize why you’d come close to nodding off mere
minutes before.”

In the Daily News,
Joe Dziemianowicz opened with: “Stop the presses: Nathan Lane saves the day—and
the play—again.” (There were a few
invocations of the world of journalism in the reviews—but then, reviewers are
also journalists.) “Broadway’s famous
comic ace is in his glory in ‘The Front Page,’” wrote the News reviewer. “Like a shot
of adrenaline laced with laughing gas, Lane jolts the lopsided and longwinded
1928 chestnut wide awake.” Dziemianowicz
continued, “The only thing wrong . . . is that he doesn’t arrive earlier,” because
for the first two-thirds of the production, the actors “are mired in mostly
expositional banter that goes in circles and stalls.” Dziemianowicz concluded, “Director Jack O’Brien’s
production is handsomely gritty and well-dressed, but only really catches fire
in the third act.” Matt Windman of am New York reported that the production
“more often than not falls flat in spite of a boisterous atmosphere and
heightened comedic tone.” He dubbed
Slattery “an ideal Hildy, with a cool and unfazed aura” and declared, “Lane
steals the final third of the show with an over-the-top performance”; but he felt,
“Goodman is loud, but strangely ineffective.”
O’Brien’s “lively and lavish production holds nothing back in terms of busy
movement and broad comedy, but the three-act play does not hold up so well by
today’s standards,” summed up Windman, who “often found myself admiring the
production but unable to enjoy it.”

Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday was “Respectfully nostalgic,
talent-stuffed revival only sparks with Nathan Lane.” Winer reported that “the much-anticipated,
talent-stuffed revival of ‘The Front Page’ has its amusing moments” until Lane
shows up about two hours into the production, but quipped that the play
nevertheless “could have been subtitled ‘Waiting for Nathan.’” But when Lane’s Walter Burns “finally comes
onstage—menacing little mustache and flipper eyebrows ablaze—the writing
actually seems funnier and the style feels fresher, less creaky.” Director O’Brien “devises particular quirks
for almost every character to stand out momentarily from the group”; however, “Lane’s
electrification of the last third cannot help make the rest feel like vamping.” The New
York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski asserted, “Broadway’s terrific ‘The Front
Page’ . . . perfectly captures the tabloid newspapers I know:
scrappy, hilarious roller-coasters of emotion.” Oleksinski called The Front Page “swift-moving” and noted
that the cast of “big-name actors” all displayed “brassy, spit-on-the-floor
’tude.” The Post reviewer joked, “Watching this top-tier talent having a ball
ribbing each other, cursing with abandon and competing to be the loudest in the
room reminds me of The Post, where, as I write this, two of my colleagues are
about to come to blows over where to buy the best bread,” adding that “you
don’t have to work here or at the Chicago Tribune to get a kick out of ‘The
Front Page’—not with Lane storming around the stage, screaming at anyone and
anything he encounters.” Oleksinski
closes with the remark, “You may hate the media, but you gotta admit—we can be
pretty entertaining.”

Calling The Front Page
“talky, gleefully squawky,” Alexis Soloski of the U.S. edition of The Guardian declared, “If ever an actor
was the theatrical equivalent of a banner headline, that actor is Nathan Lane.” Lane’s arrival is “splashed across the stage
like a 72-point font,” and “[h]is jubilant, giant performance injects a
cantankerous vitality into Jack O’Brien’s otherwise pleasant and respectful
revival.” Of the “comedy as black as
shoe polish,” Soloski complimented the set as “handsome,” the dialogue as “sharp-witted,”
and the cast as “an assemblage of some of New York’s finest character actors .
. .and big names.” Of the staging, she
wrote, “The style is vivid and almost expressionist in the way that
conversations are layered over around each other.” “Yet,” Soloski demurred, “the revival’s
energy is something less than crackling and the enterprise might have seemed
merely respectable were it not for the joyously disreputable Lane,” who “gives
a performance that is both outsized and just the right size.” Of both the play and the production, Max
McGuinness observed in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, “Things start slowly as the hacks and various
hangers-on struggle to invest much life into their dated wisecracks.” The review-writer advised O’Brien to “have
shaved 10 or 15 minutes off the first act.”
McGuinness reported, “The pace quickens with the introduction of star
reporter Hildy Johnson” and that Lane’s “arrival transforms what had been a
humdrum affair into a farcical tour de force.”
The FT reviewer described Lane
as “a theatrical centaur, [who] charges about with brawny comic energy, hauling
the rest of the cast up to a higher plane of funniness.”

In the New York Times,
Ben Brantley lamented that “though ‘The Front Page’ is all about the adrenaline
rush that turns journalists into deadline junkies, it’s hard to work up the
proper urgency about Jack O’Brien’s production.” Still, said the Timesman, it’s “diverting. Pretty
darn good. At moments, very funny
indeed.” The production, “filled to the
gills with tabloid-worthy faces, . . . looks photo-op fabulous.” Nonetheless, warned Brantley, “aside from
those moments when Mr. Lane is all but setting fire to the stage . . ., it is
not the stuff of banner headlines.” He
explained, “The show is pointedly and self-consciously funny, savoring its own
raucous wit, which paradoxically means that it just isn’t as funny as it should
be.” Brantley surmised that this might
be due to the “relentlessly socko cast” and their “grandstanding panache to
solicit not only entrance but also regular exit applause.” The Times
reviewer’s main complaint was: “What they only seldom achieve, though, is the
sense of a professional tribe collectively hypnotized by their own high-octane
mythology—moving, talking, clashing in a frenzied competitive march that holds
them prisoners of its rat-a-tat rhythms. . . . . By the end of a perfect
production, you should feel you’ve been mainlining black coffee for
two-and-a-half hours.” Each of the
characters has his or her moment in O’Brien’s production, though “these moments
rarely connect into a breathless chain of events,” reported Brantley, until
Lane’s Burns show up. “The bad news (for
this production) is that [Burns] doesn’t make his entrance until the end of the
second of the play’s three acts.” The Timesman described Burns: “He’s a
horrible man. He also burns with a
monomaniacal energy, channeled through Mr. Lane’s well-honed comic finesse,
that absorbs your utter interest and makes him as ridiculously seductive as
Greta Garbo.” In the end, Brantley
tellingly commented, “The combination of Mr. Lane’s all-consuming passion for
the theater and Walter’s for getting the story makes the endangered profession
of print journalism feel, for a flickering moment, like the most vital job on
the planet”

In the New Jersey suburbs, Robert Feldberg of the Bergen
County Record reported on NorthJersey.com
that The Front Page “jog-trots along
through its first act and most of the second, a fitfully amusing comedy” in
which “the actors have only mixed results in finding the comic potential.“ The first act is “slow-developing,” the gang of
reporters is “mostly indistinguishable,” and Slattery “is perfectly decent, but
unexceptional.” The reviewer continued,
“And then Nathan Lane, portraying the crass, scheming, heartless newspaper
editor Walter Burns, makes his initial appearance toward the end of the second
act and everything changes in a flash,” explaining, “He provides a shot of
theatrical adrenaline that propels the play through the third act.” From the Newark
Star-Ledger, Christopher Kelly reported on NJ.com that The Front Page “is definitely showing wear-and-tear.” He observed that O’Brien “never does quite
address the core issue of why bother to revive such an anachronism at all. Still, you could do a lot worse than this
epic cast,” continued Kelly. “And when
Lane finally enters the proceedings (albeit nearly two hours into the evening),
he quickly reminds us why he is the foremost comic stage actor of his
generation.” The Star-Ledger reviewer found, though, that “O’Brien’s staging of the
overlong first act [is] frustrating. Clearly
daunted by having to introduce and keep straight so many characters, this ‘Front
Page’ proves way too slack. Things
improve considerably in the second act.”
Ultimately, “we’re left wondering why so much talent is given so little
to do,” concluded Kelly, whose final assessment was that “whether you go for
this ‘Front Page’ probably has much to do with your tolerance for the blockbuster
approach to Broadway—whether you value flashy individual moments and big stars,
or whether you prefer a more coherent and transporting experience. Coherent this production is not, but that hasn’t
yet (and probably won’t) stop it from being the most buzzed-about show of the
fall.”

Michael Feingold labeled the world of The Front Page “comically warped and wincingly accurate” in the Village Voice; the “writing is
constantly funny,” but the “gritty, fact-facing realism gives the humor a
consistently bitter aftertaste, which the more extreme moments can turn to
queasiness.” The Broadway revival, said
Feingold, “navigates somewhat nervously between the two elements.” The actors seem “to have been directed to aim
for the real,” reported the Voice
reviewer, “conveying the sense that its comic zest has been dampened a little.” Feingold lamented that “several performers
cast in key roles who aren’t innately comedians . . . [fall] slightly short,”
naming especially Slattery, then asserted, “And then there’s Lane,” for whom
the director “apparently either shaped the scenes painstakingly with him or set
him happily free to do as he likes. All
of which would count for little if Lane didn’t also have the authority, the
charisma, and the comic skill to ping home every sly word and make every gag
hit dead center, like a champion dart player.”
The Voice review-writer summed
up, “That he makes it all look so easy is an extra scoop of ice cream on this
exceptionally bittersweet confection.”

In New York
magazine, Jesse Green labeled the latest revival of The Front Page “a top-notch production” that “gets to a man’s heart
through his ears.” Likening the first
act to “an orchestral tone poem,” Green asserted, “The slow build, like the
play overall, is a masterpiece of construction, the kind that for a hundred
reasons (including the cost of a 25-person cast) shouldn’t work today, but that
under Jack O’Brien’s nervy direction undeniably does.” The man from New York declared that “one of the very deep pleasures” of this Front Page is “to watch a large ensemble
of character actors do what they’re so good at,” with a few unnamed exceptions,
naming the members of the featured cast.
Saving lavish praise for Lane, Green observed, “So definitive and
dominating is he that it’s tempting to leave the rest of the cast in his
shadow.” The reviewer continued, “Often
thought of as a wit or a clown, Lane is really a time bomb onstage, with no
fuse and an infinite payload.” In the
end, Green declared that “The Front Page is a classic not only for
its playability but also for its timelessness.”
In the New Yorker, Hilton Als
called the production an “outstanding revival” with “a surfeit of fantastic
actors, who give the production everything they’ve got.” Director O’Brien, who “utilizes the best of what
Broadway has to offer—a big stage, a solid budget, slick production values—has
not only created a milieu in which the performers can shine; he allows them the
space to establish their characterizations” and the designers have “created a
hyperstylized and yet still believable world.”

David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” for his Hollywood Reporter review was “The headline is a long time coming but worth the wait” and he went on
to call this Front Page Broadway production a “sturdy chestnut,” a “lavishly
cast . . ., deluxe Broadway revival,” and “crackling entertainment.” He warned about the “unhurried three-act
construction and long wait for the main sparring partners to share scenes,” but
affirmed that “it’s a marvel of theatrical craftsmanship.” Still the HR reviewer (who, according
to a note published with the review, “was prevented from attending a preview
performance with a purchased ticket, and disinvited to opening night” because
of an unspecified dispute with lead producer Rudin) found that “O’Brien sets up
and lands punch lines with machine-tooled precision rather than coaxing the
humor organically from the situations. That
also has the effect of softening the play’s delicious cynicism and undercutting
its melodrama.” Rooney also felt that
Slattery is “miscast,” eschewing “the raw hunger of a competitive man addicted
to the thrill of the scoop and the adrenaline rush of the deadline” for “Hildy’s
Brylcreem-slick suavity.” Even though
some of the other “impressive” cast are “under-employed,” however, “the
production delivers big time.” Like most
of his colleagues, the HR writer reported that “the play only really
starts firing on all cylinders once Lane enters,” for “the galvanizing force of
Lane’s performance erases any concerns about the production’s unevenness.”

In Entertainment
Weekly, Chris Nashawaty quipped that the revival of The Front Page “makes the cardinal sin of burying the lead”: “the
first act is both over-long and too broad. It’s flat where it should be fizzy.” Further, “Slattery feels a little too
lightweight in the part. He doesn’t
convincingly give off the calculating smarts and socko charisma the character
should.” Nashawaty also laments that “it
isn’t until halfway through the nearly three-hour running time when Nathan Lane
. . . finally makes his entrance that the show catches fire.” He praised the actor as “like a human
defibrillator whose presence single-handedly puts the production back on
course.” The EW reviewer concluded that The
Front Page is “smart, subversive, and seemingly timeless. Too bad that this time around it’s also an
ensemble comedy that feels like a one-man show.”

David Cote of Time Out New York dubbed the production
a “5,000-volt revival . . . whipped into a hellacious comic frenzy by one of
the best acting ensembles you and I may ever see.” Cote added that O’Brien’s “pedal-to-the-metal
production is astonishingly true to the spirit and letter of the script,” despite the director’s sanitization, and his
“pacing is masterful.” The acting “seals
the deal,” affirmed the man from TONY,
and “Lane and Slattery’s mutually abusive, rat-a-tat rapport is a thing of
beauty.” At bottom, Cote recommended
that theatergoers “see this brutally brilliant masterpiece, and you’ll be
inoculated against the viciousness of the world.” With “a starry cast,” director O’Brien presents “an impeccable
revival” of The Front Page, affirmed Marilyn
Stasio in Variety. If the director missed any of the “variety of
opportunities for farcical comedy,” Stasio “failed to catch it.” The Variety
reviewer found, “The production is as close to perfection as it comes, peaking
in sheer hilarity when [Lane] roars onstage.”
Declaring that “they don’t write ensemble plays like this anymore,”
Stasio ended by asserting, “Count yourself lucky if you scored a seat. You won’t forget it.”

In the cyber press, New
York Theatre Guide’s Kathleen Campion reported that “The Front Page has a
good deal of energy—the huge cast rockets around the one room set” and that “one-to-one
exchanges between and among the three principals . . . are rich and pithy and
often funny.” She also complained, “They are also often so broad and
predictable as to be eye-rolling. I’m
not sure they are enough to keep you riveted for three acts, especially because
you have to wait till act two to lay eyes on Nathan Lane.” Slattery and Nathan’s moments “are small
diamonds in a rhinestone wash of a show . . . but somehow you just don’t buy
him as the gritty, tough guy.” Campion
concluded, “The production feels long”; it has “many good moments, but you do
have to pay the piper with your patience.”
On Theater Pizzazz, Sandi
Durell reported that The Front Page,
with “superb direction” by O’Brien, “has it all when it comes to political
hacks and sleazy journalists . . . but misses greatly waiting till more than
half the show is over before releasing the likes of Nathan Lane and his
inimitable shtick.“ As Durell noted,
Lane’s “performance is merciless and non-stop and every reason to see this
farce.”

On TheaterScene, Eugene
Paul labeled the Broadway mounting of The
Front Page a “lovingly painstaking revival, crammed to the gills with
famous star names doing star turns, smashingly designed . . ., [and]
dressed to achingly nostalgic perfection.” Paul asserted, “In spite of what appears to be
brash, slap dash writing tumbling out a cast of stock characters, there is a
solid, well worked out frame to the play which drives story, the heart of a
show, like a locomotive, and director O’Brien takes advantage of every bit.” Elyse Sommer warned on CurtainUp that “the enjoyable presentation and excellent
performances notwithstanding, once you get over admiring the set and the
costumes and listen to some of the insults and phone calls flying around the
room, the rest of the first act and part of the second are a too dragged out
setup.” The CU reviewer affirmed that “it’s not until Nathan Lane’s Editor
Burns, smelling an unmissable scoop, finally plants himself center stage that
this production bursts into full-blown laugh-aloud mode.”

Marc Miller of NY
Theatre Guide characterized this Front
Page, a “rude, rough-and-tumble look at Chicago Jazz Age,” as a “starry,
wall-shaking revival.” Sensing “a
certain audience restlessness during the first act,” Miller “was having a wonderful
time” anticipating who would come through the press room door next. “When Walter does finally show up,” reported
the cyber reviewer, “. . . the energy, which was plenty vigorous to begin with,
ramps up tenfold.” Hecht and MacArthur,
whom Miller proclaimed the “real heroes of the evening,” devised “a full plate,
and this ‘Front Page’ serves it up piping hot.”
On Broadway World, Michael
Dale labeled the production a “raucously good revival” in which “a terrific
cast bangs out the gritty, wise-cracking dialogue . . . with the precision
of freshly greased keys striking at the platen of a Royal typewriter.” The BWW
reviewer added, “Nathan Lane and John Slattery lead the way, but the
twenty-five member ensemble . . . contribute solidly to a rousing production.” Lane’s “flourishing comedic energy commands
every moment for the rest of the evening.”
Dale summed up with: “O’Brien’s staging races to a frantic conclusion
and one of the American theatre’s most glorious curtain lines. This is satisfying old-school, muscular comedy
done right.”

“The Internet may be adept at killing newspapers (or at
least putting them on life support),” quipped Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway, “but there’s no way it can ever kill The Front Page.” In his
opinion, “It hardly matters that” the play “no longer has much relevance as
either a social or a journalistic document; in its towering political
shenanigans and its nonstop Gatling Gun dialogue . . ., it’s about as timeless
and indestructible on the page as any play of the last 100 years can be.” Nonetheless, Murray felt that of the large
cast, “there is only one who scores an unconditional success, and a second who
comes within spitting distance of it.” The
TB reviewer explained, “Everyone else
works hard—frequently too hard.” Murray
is the odd man out among his critical colleagues in that the two praiseworthy
performances he noted come from Slattery and Taylor, while he had strongly unfavorable
things to say about all the other actors, including Lane, who’s “all wrong,
lacking the naked drive and violent, skyrocketing ambition” of Murray’s ideal
Burns. Slattery, on the other hand, “is,
above all else, resolutely real.” The
director “should have done more to elicit the life-threatening urgency” from
the performances. For a play like The Front Page to work, “you have to buy
into what’s happening completely . . ., and only Slattery [is] immersed in this
world.” The TB writer lamented, “Wonderful as he is, though, Slattery alone is
not enough to make this version of The Front Page banner
headline news.”

“That’s not the sound of a fleet of flivvers backfiring that
you hear at the Broadhurst on West 44th Street these nights,” reported Steven
Suskin in the Huffington Post. “It’s laughter, cascading and echoing like bullets
from tommy guns of the St. Valentine’s Day variety, circa 1928 Chicago.” The
Front Page is “as riproaring as ever,” wrote the HP reviewer, as the revival, “happily, fires on all cylinders.” With lavish praise for the whole cast, Suskin
added that O’Brien “does an impeccable job here” and that there’s “also a
top-of-the-line physical production.” The
whole company does well “bringing today’s audiences a flavorfully-blustery,
quaintly blasphemous comic feast,” concluded the HP writer. TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart dubbed
the revival of The Front Page, a
“lumbering and overloaded” play, a “hit-or-miss production” that “is at its
funniest when that resonance shines through.” But Stewart found that “the tone of the play
is not always consistent.” Though the
cast is “[i]ndividually, . . . very funny . . . [i]t begins to feel like the
night of a thousand shticks.” O’Brien “fails
to bring harmony to the proceedings” until “Lane enters with a show-stealing
performance.” TM’s review-writer predicted that “some viewers will be tempted to
flee at the first intermission . . ., but they really shouldn’t: The
Front Page takes a long time to warm up, but once it does, it proves
worth the wait.”

On the TimeWarner
Cable system’s news channel, NY1, Roma Torre called the Front Page revival an “over-caffeinated” and “terrific production,”
but warned, “It takes a good hour before the plot . . . kicks in.” Torre continued, however, that “fortunately, the
character actors playing the newspapermen . . . are standouts—each one. And if it seems that nothing’s happening for a
good while, it’s a thrill just to watch these fine performers ply their craft.” The NY1 reporter further remarked, “The
show’s period perfect technical designs deserve a bow as well.” She especially praised Goodman (“full of
bluff and bluster”), Slattery (“displaying tremendous versatility”), and Lane
(“bigger than life”). Torre was
particularly complimentary about the way O’Brien “masterfully directed the
physical humor” and she concluded, “As for a headline . . . read all about it: ’Front Page’ is a winnah!” WNYC
radio’s Jennifer Vanasco, however, pondered, “Just why anyone thought it would
be a good idea to bring ‘The Front Page’ back to Broadway in Fall 2016—an
election year—isn’t clear to me.” Aside
from the cast—Lane, “who almost (but doesn’t quite) save the show,” and
Slattery, “who, surprisingly, drags the play down”—and its subject, journalism,
Vanasco found the total lack of 21st-century political correctness an
offense. “It feels a bit sleazy to watch
this play now, a bit tone-deaf,” she stated, listing the inappropriate aspects
of the play by today’s standards. Lane’s
performance is “almost funny enough to smooth over the show's unfortunate
dialogue,” but he “just can’t do it alone.”
The WNYC reviewer declared, “For ‘The Front Page’ to work in our
contemporary era, it needs a rewrite,” and suggested some changes O’Brien might
have made to remedy the problems: “multi-racial casting. A female reporter or mayor. Some judicious chopping of terms like ‘bazooms.’” (I don’t usually comment on reviewers’ notices
in my play reports, but do I have to point out why this is so wrong? Applying the standards of today to a work
from almost 90 years ago? It would be
exactly like John Ashcroft draping the partially nude, Depression-era statues
of Spirit of Justice and Majesty of Law in the Great Hall of the
Department of Justice in 2002.)

Robert Kahn of WNBC, the network-owned television outlet in
New York, characterized The Front Page
as a “frenetic comedy” and the Broadway revival as a “grand-looking new
production.” Kahn reported that “it
takes a while for ‘The Front Page’ to hit its stride,” but “things really pick
up” when Lane, “in classic form,” “make[s] his entrance.” The TV reviewer added, “Like Lane, [Slattery’s]
adept with the physical comedy, and seems to be having a great time,” but “Goodman
doesn’t fare quite as well in a one-note role.”
He noted that The Front Page “shows
its age,” but “the pros . . . know how to manage the material and deliver an
ink-stained good time.” (Having
commented on the un-PC aspects of The
Front Page, Kahn remarked, as if in response to WNYC’s Vanasco: “This is a
period piece that hearkens back to a time when reporters carried flasks and an
HR rep would be tossed out a window if she introduced a dialogue about
harassment or proper workplace behavior.”)

Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press opened his review with
a little parody: “This sap of a play is older than yesterday’s news. But, I’ll level with you. This is the God’s honest truth: A fellow named
Nathan Lane somehow saves it.”Calling
the play “the most jaundiced view of journalism ever to grace a stage,” Kennedy
reported, “The play has not aged well and may have you wondering why this
88-year-old needs another spin. Then
Lane shows up deep into Act 2 in the nick of time.”The AP review-writer asserted, Lane’s “dry
humor and gift for physical comedy have never been more urgently needed.”The play “smells a little off and it’s
hopelessly old-fashioned, like a weird uncle who shows up on holidays.”Still, Kennedy acknowledged, “once in a while
it’s sort of fun.”The director “has not
worked out all the kinks in a script that often sounds like a machine gun of
words” and not all the actors handle the play’s style effectively, and “[w]ithout
Lane, there’s little reason for this revival.”Essentially, Kennedy asserted, Lane makes you forget all the
deficiencies of the play and the production.“You are watching a master at work and that’s the headline, period.”

1 comment:

On Tuesday, 2 May, the American Theatre Wing announced the 2017 Tony nominations. Nathan Lane received a nod for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play and Douglas W. Schmidt was nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Play. The 71st Annual Tony Award ceremony will be on Sunday,11 June.